General Fight Club
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
I disagree with both statements here.
Most people have very few gold slots per guild (I have 3 at 450) and they are powerful cards that pull people into the color combinations. With one less in certain guilds, they will get played a little less. So it is important to have a balance there.
And Finks should not go into these sections because they don't fulfil the criteria for a gold slot. They don't require you to be in both of their colors and therefore they don't pull a white drafter into green or vice versa. You are weakening selesnya by making one of their gold cards a great choice for Golgari and Azorius.
I agree that havin 60 blue and 61 black cards makes just a very small difference. But this, using hybrids as gold cards, is much much worse for your cube balance.
Na. I almost went on to talk about how great Glare is, but didn't wanna make my post require more than a second to read. Glare is in the expected colors and will never immediately end a close game. I think we played one game with Opposition in my earliest Cube stages and everyone who was in or saw that game wanted it gone.
Also, let's make sure the next ten pages of this thread are about which section to put our couple of hybrid cards in.
It just doesn't matter all that much. As long as the ratios are close to correct, it really doesn't matter how hybrid cards are counted. The Selesnya section isn't any weaker just because it has a flexible card that another guild deck can use.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Poppycock. Your cube will be fine if you do that. Besides, no one said you had to have equal gold numbers for each guild if you put the Finks there. Really, no one is going to notice (during draft) if you run 60 blue, 60 black, and 3 Dimir cards, but 60 white, 59 green, 3 Selesnya, and 1 Kitchen Finks. When looking at your cube online, Finks is going to register as a Selesnya card, because it is, so you might as well put it in the gold section. If you insist on an equal number of true gold cards per guild, just be flexible with the total number of gold cards per guild.
I understand wanting sort of an equal distribution of all colors and pairs, but during a draft it doesn't actually impact that much because if one color is overrepresented more people will move into that color. This is how it works in normal retail draft.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Wasn't this the great cube debate of like, 2012? Where to put Lord ape on your spreadsheet and weather it matters?
This is a similar debate to that, but it's not the same.
Sir High Lord Kird Ape, Breaker of Chains, Duke of Burgundy, Prince of Westphalia was often being considered a mono-red card until some people started moving it into the Gruul section. I think Jason may have been among the first to do that, actually. Since Sir High Lord Kird Ape, Breaker of Chains, Duke of Burgundy, Prince of Westphalia requires a forest to be of any major value, the argument goes that he should be considered a Gruul card. He just isn't as good without some level of Green.
This is a bit of the opposite issue. Kitchen Finks has all of the trappings of a Selesnya card, and is indeed the easiest to play in Selesnya. However, he's also completely playable in a deck without one of his two colors. I think the easiest solution would to just be to make a hybrid slot. However, even that answer isn't perfect. The problem is that the since hybrid card pool is so small, it's hard to find 10 good hybrid cards of a similar power level. Is it really worth using a space in the cube for Selkie Hedge-Mage just to facilitate Kitchen Finks? I don't think the answer to that question is yes for most people. The GRN/RNA "Hybrid Splits" helped this along a little, but even then those cards aren't really at full value unless they're being run in a deck where both halves can be utilized.
In addition, there is also the issue of cards like Boros Reckoner and Whistful Selkie. Both of these cards use hybrid mana, but they're both nearly impossible to cast outside of their respective guild deck. You can play Kitchen Finks in an Esper deck, you really can't with Boros Reckoner.
Do whatever you wanna do, it doesn't mattttttttterrrrr....
Do you really need 10 cards of a similar power level though? I think balancing ratios are fine if that's like an aesthetic thing, but I just don't think that should even be on the radar when it comes to balancing and developing a good environment. Keeping your numbers nice and clean should be the least of your issues. Yeah, it's more aesthetically pleasing to run 3 or 4 of every gold guild combination and have even numbers across the board when pulling up your list online, but that shouldn't be a priority. I have a gold section I try to keep about even with my offerings in mono-colored (usually 54-55 at my 420 set up), but I'm not nitpicky enough to have even numbers across guilds and the "5c" section. Simic and Boros were a revolving door of ehhhh cards for years until Ravnica 3: Electric Boogaloo the Return happened. I mean, I've kept Murderous Redcap in my cube through all iterations from when I first constructed it in 2014 but I've jumped between plugging it at as a Rakdos, Black or Red card depending upon the offerings I had available and what I wanted to try out in other slots. No one has ever noticed or cared where it was classified, just that it was available because it's sweet.
I keep Kitchen Finks in the Selesnya section not because it's the best fit or anything, but because Green and White 3s are fucking stacked nowadays and I want to use those slots for other things. That's it. If it comes to the point where a cool Selesnya card with GW in the mana cost comes out that I want to run, I'll find the least interesting card at that slot in Green or White and just shift over Finks. It really doesn't matter. Finks adds more to your environment than whatever card its fighting with in White/Green/Selesnya? Just cut that motherfucker and jam in Finks if it's the right call for your cube.
I keep Kitchen Finks in the Selesnya section not because it's the best fit or anything, but because Green and White 3s are fucking stacked nowadays and I want to use those slots for other things. That's it. If it comes to the point where a cool Selesnya card with GW in the mana cost comes out that I want to run, I'll find the least interesting card at that slot in Green or White and just shift over Finks. It really doesn't matter. Finks adds more to your environment than whatever card its fighting with in White/Green/Selesnya? Just cut that motherfucker and jam in Finks if it's the right call for your cube.
I think Warleader is probably the fairest of those options in a vacuum (definitely the worst art though). Brimaz is a bit too early and too efficient at what it does and there aren't really any decisions to be made, Hero has a more relevant creature type but Battle Cry is a real beating if you've curved out into it the previous turns. If I had to run one of them in my cube I'd probably go with Hero since I'm a bit higher powered, but Warleader is probably the most fair of those 3.
Leonin Warleader's art violates the Geneva Conventions.New topic
Fight
I think Brimaz, King of Oreskos is a pretty cool magic card, but like shamizy says it's a bit of a decision killer (at least for his pilot). That said, I like how he doesn't gain his controller life and doesn't put more than 4 power on the board for his first attack. Unlike the other cards, I think the king is the least of a removal check, despite the fact that he can spiral out of control if left unchecked for too long. It doesn't feel bad to Lava Coil Brimaz even if he's been making tokens for a turn or two.
I would offer a more reasonable replacement for these guys, but there really isn't anything that repeatedly makes free tokens like them in white except for Luminous Angel, which is significantly weaker than the others. There are other variants which can make multiple tokens from a mana payment or some other condition, but they're not as consistent. There are also a plethora of similar ETB token makers, but they can only make tokens once.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
There's...
Fuck Brimaz. Marry Hero. Kill Warleader.New topic
Fight
+1 on "Kill Warleader."
I would agree that Brimaz is the most fair. He's the only one I'd actually want to put into one of my cubes.
To be fair, I might consider the Warleader if the art wasn't such a war crime and the tokens didn't have lifelink. The lifelink is what kills that one for me.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Y'all are crazy, Brimaz and hero are both insanely over the top
Warleader's art may suck, but the power level I feel is prettywell right, even if there's things I like better
Warleader's art may suck, but the power level I feel is prettywell right, even if there's things I like better
Hybrid slots are lame. Slot hybrids into your monocolor slots in roughly equal proportions per neighboring color pair.
I just stopped caring about hybrid 'slots.' As far as I'm concerned, hybrids are free, like artifacts or lands. That goes for mono-color cards with off-color activated abilities or flashback costs as well, those are just cards of their parent color. This philosophy came from desperately trying and failing to find a simic hybrid worth running.
Right, we're on the same page, but I think my initial comment was perhaps ambiguous.
What I meant was, say you have 2 Selesnya hybrids you want to run and 8 Rakdos hybrids you want. That's totally fine. You can just split the Rakdos ones 4|4 into red and black slots and maintain your color representation across the cube. Then split your Selesnya ones 1|1. If you have no Simic cards you want, that's great too. 0|0 split!
